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Introduction to Linux - A Hands on Guide

This guide was created as an overview of the Linux Operating System, geared toward new users as an exploration tour and getting started guide, with exercises at the end of each chapter.
For more advanced trainees it can be a desktop reference, and a collection of the base knowledge needed to proceed with system and network administration. This book contains many real life examples derived from the author's experience as a Linux system and network administrator, trainer and consultant. They hope these examples will help you to get a better understanding of the Linux system and that you feel encouraged to try out things on your own.

Wow... I was totally blown away when I installed it. I tried to set up a file server on SuSE, Ubuntu, Mepis, and some others, but none of them were easy to configure. This was just amazing.. it was so simple!

It also automatically makes a grouped volume (I forgot what it's called... LVM i think) which SuSE could never do right.

Would you recommend the product? no | Price you paid?: None indicated | Rating: 5

Pros:

Good hardware detection

Cons:

I dunno why , but somehow centos messedup my system, Install went perfect, it even detected and configured my webcam :). On the first boot , it asked me for my default resolution which i set it to 1024x768, but for some reason it didnt switch to it, but kept at 800x600, It even messedup my secondary drive, after installing centos, my windows xp couldnt see the secondary drive partitions.

Switching from XWindows to CLI and back to Xwindows messed up my Xwindows. This problem used to be there in RH 7 or something, but i didnt have this problem with Fedora 1,2,3,4

I stumbled on CentOS when corporate sent us a test Oracle server which was running it. It seems stable and requires minimum maintenance.

I downloaded CentOS 4.3 and tried it out on just for s&g. If I was going to maintain the corporate server I wanted to have some experience with CentOS elsewhere. It seems to do everything I want it to.

Happenstantially, I stumbled onto CentOS Live which is a CD-bootable version. I use this version on my corporate laptop to get access to the 'Net from hotel rooms. This keeps my corporate data safe and they have no idea where I was.

I was using DSL on my old ThinkPad T30 but DSL and CentOS refused to recognize the on-board NIC in my new T60. But CentOS did recognize my PCMCIA NIC (D-Link GigaExpress DGE-660TD) so I'm up and at 'em again --- safe and sound.

I was never a Red Hat fan, so when it was suggested that I tried CentOS I was very skeptical. Now that I've tried it I'd have to say that I am a believer. Of course the SSH problem mentioned above continues to be a problem, but the system is rock solid otherwise.

Currently I have three machines running CentOS. Each started like as 4.3. Two have been upgraded to 4.4 and have SSH issues. One is a server, another (the old 600 Mhz) is being configured as a router and the third will likely be setup as an NFS or NAS unit for storage flexibility without needing to touch the master server unit.

I use CentOS v4.4 on several systems, including our in home file server and my daughter's desktop PC at college. She has been very happy with the stability of CentOS (she had many WinXP issues before). She can easily install software and administer the system at school with little help from Dad. Highly recommended.

I really like CentOS 4.4 for its stability and simplicity. It's a very intuitive distro with not too steep a learning curve. The networking tools are very good, and they work 100% of the time.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 4 is a very stable distro due to its long development cycle. The same can be said of CentOS 4.4 - very solid. Kind of cheezy artwork, but that has ceased to bug me because of what's under the hood - a finely tuned engine! If you want everything to work predictably with no muss & fuss, this is the distro for you! It installed like a charm on my Pentium 4 2.4 ghz with an 80 gig SATA and 512 megs of memory. NVidia graphics 128 megs installed no problem as well.

Of course, there is always a trade-off for stability, and CentOS is no exception. Some of the programs are a bit oldish. For example, there is no support for my EPSON 2480 scanner even though it is almost two years old. It is possible to download the source code and compile the newer SANE backends, but then getting it to work with XSane is beyond me (xscanimage works though, so it's a least useable).

Another problem experienced was getting the MySQL Gui Tools (compiled specifically for RHEL 4) to work with with CentOS 4.4. So it is not an exact clone of Red Hat, but it's darned close.

I like this distro because it is dependable. Fedora 6 is cutting edge and would likely support my hardware better, but it is so confusing and (I believe) unstable that I can't trust it. For us old farts who have ceased to live life in the fast lane, something like CentOS just what the doctor ordered.

I do consider myself a newbie, an I have tried many flavors of Linux.
This was the only distro I was able to install with software Raid5 composed of 4 SATA HDs from scratch easily, also it detected all of my hardware with no problem, even dual monitors.
I use it for file server, it is very stable, only have restarted few times when upgrading kernel.
but it has a lot of old software, every time I wanted to install OOOrg2, it installed v1.1.
For LAMP, I use another machine with Ubuntu server edition, works like a charm, and I prefer apt-get over yum.

Back when Red Hat Linux was a product delivered by Red Hat Inc. in its final form, the user community had little visibility into the decisions that affected the distribution. One of the early promises that came with the Fedora Project was that the important discussions would happen in a public forum. Things have not always happened that way, and a number of things still seem to happen by anonymous decree. It is true, however, that the public discussion has grown more vibrant as the wider Fedora community insists on having its say.

One recurring discussion has to do with one of those decisions by decree: Fedora Core 5 lacks the "install everything" option which has characterized Red Hat releases for many years. The reasons behind this change make some sense: it is increasingly hard to support as the distribution grows, and as the distribution is split between "core" and "extras." Some packages conflict with others, making a true "everything" install impossible in any case. Installing everything is an invitation to unnecessary security problems. And the Anaconda installer has been reworked around a yum-based backend which is not so well equipped to do "everything" installs in any case. Administrators who do a lot of "everything" installs can use kickstart to obtain something close to the old behavior.

So removing this option was not an unreasonable thing to do. But the community was not involved in the decision, and quite a few Fedora users are most unhappy with the change. Since there was no discussion - not even an announcement of the change - these unhappy users continue to fill the Fedora lists with complaints; it is beginning to look like one of those threads which never really goes away. But, "install everything" has gone away, and appears highly unlikely to return.

A more relevant discussion, perhaps, is this one: what is to happen with evolution in Fedora Core? The state of the FC5 evolution package is evidently so poor that some Red Hat developers are suggesting that it should be shoved out to Fedora Extras, or dropped altogether:

Evolution in extras is a bad idea. Evolution in core is a worse idea. What other as good as unmaintained large buggy package exposed to external attack and with known unfixed DoS bugs (and probably worse yet to be found) do we ship.